After making sure my Windows 7 install was working properly I decided to install the RC of Windows Virtual PC. This will allow me to use XP mode if I need it and also let me work with some of my existing virtual machines that I had setup with Virtual PC 2007. You will have to uninstall Virtual PC 2007 to install the RC, you will also have to uninstall the Windows Virtual PC beta if you had previously installed it. As has been talked about plenty in the press you will also have to have a CPU that supports virtualization. This would be Intel-VT or AMD-V support.

Everything went well with the install. Then I installed the XP mode piece (which is primarily a virtual machine of XP). Again everything worked well.

Now it was time to try one of my existing Virtual Machines and the first problem arose. One of my VMs had a VHD that was split into multiple files with the first two being about 14Gb and the last one being very small. When I tried to use this VHD WVPC could not find the VHD file. This seemed odd since I could see it fine and I could even copy it. When I copied it WVPC could see the file, but when it tried to use it there was a disk error – somewhat to be expected since the name had been changed on the copy. So I figured I’d rename the copy back to the original name and guess what, WVPC could not see the file anymore.

At this point I tried another VHD that was much smaller. This seemed to work fine so I guessed that the split file was causing the problem. VHD’s are split very simply, so I used the tried and true Copy command to combine the files together. This solved the problem and I was able to start up the VM and work with it…problem solved.

Now that it worked, I tried to rename the file back to the original name – for some reason WVPC was still having a problem with the old name. So I renamed it back to the copied name and left it. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.

On August 6th the RTM version of Windows 7 was made available to MSDN subscribers. So naturally I had to download it as soon as I could. I decided to try an upgrade on my Dell Studio 17. My Dell was running Vista Ultimate x64 and I figured it would make sense to simply upgrade to Windows 7 Ultimate x64. This machine has 4Gb of memory and plenty of free disk space so I didn’t think it would take that long to upgrade.

Well, it took about 4.5 hours to finish the complete upgrade…a little longer than I expected. But I figure I’ll only have to do this once so no big deal.

I was pleased when everything that had been working still worked. I know I have expected everything to be fine, but this is an upgrade so anything was possible.

The only thing that had real problems was Trend Micro Internet Security’s firewall.

Odd things:

• The Camera software from Dell was a bit flaky (but it was always a little flaky)
• Selecting both minimize on use and Hide when minimized in Task manager caused it to always be shown in the task bar.
  

One thing that pleasantly surprised me was the AT&T wireless card. it worked without any changes. The other thing I noticed was that the fingerprint reader seems to work better (maybe my hands are cleaner…).

There are still plenty of things I need to check, but so far it is working flawlessly.